University College London

Client

Services delivered by Lean Business

What did they need?

UCL EDUCATE programme sought to procure a solution from a technology partner that can devise and develop an appropriate suite of entrepreneurship tools for live operational use with the following critical objectives:

A toolset that caters for both business and research disciplines

Can be used to monitor and track the progress of cohort members and cohort groups to satisfy ERDF agreed deliverables

Can satisfy ERDF evidentiary and compliance requirements

Can be administered and used by UCL EDUCATE staff, cohorts, and external support parties

Solution

UCL has procured Lean Business Platform (LBP) to enable cohort management and portfolio business progress monitoring and development.

LBP is currently delivering for UCL Institute of Education EDUCATE

A white label SaaS being used as the internal ‘engine’ for new venture growth and collaborative incubation projects for the programme duration with additional options for 2 years

An all-new ‘Research’ case-template built on LBP framework being used for academic research projects

Supporting cohort performance dashboard and analytics tools

Lean Training and support for approximately 250 innovative technology startups and scale-ups

Use of LBP for PhD and post-graduate students of the UCL Institute of Education

Background

The EDUCATE project is a three year European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) funded initiative that is led by University College London. EDUCATE is delivering a physical and virtual Edtech incubator for technology SMEs. The focus of EDUCATE is to provide business growth support and bespoke mentoring for approximately 250 Edtech SMEs across the lifetime of the programme, working with business and academic mentors to help inform the design of their innovative products and services.

UCL required a solution that is able to support all this activity, help to facilitate collaboration between SMEs and mentors on their innovation projects, and track and manage business progress outputs to provide key evidence of intervention and impact for ERDF compliance requirements.

The UCL Institute of Education is a world-leading centre for research and teaching in social science, education, and learning technologies, ranked number one for education worldwide in the 2014, 2015 and 2016 QS World University Rankings.

What do our clients say?

“Lean Business listened to our requirements, analysed them and proposed a solution that matches our specific needs with the general strengths of the Lean Business Entrepreneurship Platform.Using the solution has created great value for the companies in our incubation programs and we are looking forward to extending our use of the platform.”

Atle Riskedal, Validé

“During the last four years, Lean Business has continuously delivered high value to us and have enabled hundreds of entrepreneurs to better build their businesses.What makes us really enjoy working with Lean Business is their ability to listen to us and adapt their deliveries to our needs. We especially appreciate their eagerness to learn and constantly improve their service to us.”

May Britt Roald,
Program Owner hoppid.no by Møre & Romsdal County

“We are very pleased with the overall delivery and give Lean Business top marks!Lean Business has delivered to the letter throughout the contract period, and even beyond our expectations by continuously evaluating and adjusting their delivery in cooperation with us, all the time focusing on value for the end customers – the entrepreneurs.”

Margit Klingen Daams, Innovation Norway

“The Lean Business Platform gives us the opportunity to create some really strong and structuret learning processes with the entrepreneurial field.We used to work with 4-5 different systems and platform, which was quite cumbersome for the students and a mess for us with regards to collecting data.”

Martin Vesterby, Aarhus University

Want to know what we can do for you?

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